I had also known that George Wash­ing­ton was the one of the wealth­i­est landown­ers in the United States, sub­se­quent to his mar­riage to Martha Custis.

And while I had real­ized that the Stamp Act was intro­duced in order to pay for the expen­sive French and Indian Wars, I had not con­sid­ered the fact that the folks with the most to lose because of the increased tax­a­tion were the wealthy. This was fol­lowed by the repeal of the Stamp Act and its replace­ment by the Town­shend Acts which estab­lished addi­tional duties on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea, which the colonies could nei­ther pro­duce in North Amer­ica, nor buy from any­one but Britain.

Fur­ther, and even more impor­tant, is the fact that the British crown was con­tra­dict­ing itself with the Royal Procla­ma­tion of 1763 lim­it­ing expan­sion west­ward (to avoid re-starting war with the Indi­ans), and promises to pro­vide bounty land out­side the Procla­ma­tion line to sol­diers who had served the crown in the French and Indian Wars.

So, eco­nom­i­cally, a man like George Wash­ing­ton was see­ing promised land grants delayed, while taxes and exter­nal con­trol from Britain was being increased. It would have been polit­i­cal and eco­nomic sui­cide for Wash­ing­ton and his peers to ignore these provo­ca­tions from England.